Harry Targ
A Chicago Tribune photo.
WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 14, 2021
A Repost of an
essay: RACISM, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, AND CIVILIAN POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY (originally
posted on Friday, October 14, 2014)
Harry Targ
Over the last several years the criminal justice
systems at the federal, state, and local levels have threatened the basic
rights of citizens, particularly people of color and youth. These violations of
equal treatment under the law have included:
-a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante
killings of young African American men, for example Trayvon Martin and Jordan
Davis in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California,
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, John Crawford III in Dayton, Ohio,
Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles
-the mass incarceration of people of color such that,
as Michelle Alexander has reported in her recent book, The New Jim Crow,
more African Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal
justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;
-the institutionalization of laws increasing
surveillance;
-and the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws,
justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat.
On August 9, 2014 unarmed nineteen-year-old
African-American Michael Brown was shot multiple times by a Ferguson, Missouri
policeman. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that
followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas,
strong-arm arrests, and the threatening of street protestors with military
vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of
a people under assault. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson
have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city
was heightened by the killing of Michael Brown.
Significant events since the police murder have been
protests, the visit to the Ferguson community by Attorney General Eric Holder
and national mobilizations in Ferguson and around the country. Subsequent to
that police killing, many more African American men have been killed by police
officers across the nation. However within the last few days
“testimony” leaked from the grand jury investigating the police crime has
appeared in the St Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post that
promotes a narrative that the police officer who murdered Brown was acting in
self-defense.
Along with police killings other police abuse occurs
regularly. In Hammond, Indiana, on September 24, 2014, an African American
women, who was the driver of a car and mother of two children in the back seat,
and an adult male friend in the front passenger seat, was pulled over by a
police officer for a seat belt violation. Fortunately nobody died, but the
policeman drew his weapon and shattered the automobile’s front side window. The
policeman had ordered the male to roll down the window, tasered and then
arrested him while the seven year old daughter of the driver cried in the back
seat. Subsequently Hammond authorities have defended the conduct of the police
officer.
In a recently released study, journalists discovered
that between 2010 and 2012 young Black males were shot to death by police 21
times more than young whites. Their data was limited to those two years because
earlier information accumulated by the FBI was incomplete. Prior to that time
police departments had not filed required reports when police used force.
Even though data is partial, Professor Colin Loftin,
co-director of the Violence Research Group, University of Alabama, said, “No
question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice
system.” (Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones an Eric Sagara, “Deadly
Force, in Black and White,” http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white,
October 10, 2014).
A growing body of evidence suggests that the criminal
justice system administers justice in an unfair way--from general
police/community relations, to trials and incarceration, to the use of violence
and deadly force against minority youth.
While police are supposed to serve the interests of
the communities in which they work, compelling evidence suggests that, to the
contrary, force is used to stifle dissent and challenge assertions of political
and cultural autonomy. The data overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that
police systems are institutionalized forms of racism.
In response to racist police violence the Chicago
Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a branch of the National
Alliance founded in 1973, has been working to “stop police crimes,” establish
“prison reform,” and to oppose the incarceration of persons wrongfully
incarcerated including political prisoners.
The CAARPR has proposed the establishment of a
Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) for the city. According to the
plan, the city would create an elected CPAC which would oversee the personnel
and policy of the police department. CPAC would appoint the Superintendent of
Police, revise rules for police practices, investigate police misconduct,
investigate all police shootings, and provide for transparency in
investigations. The central premise of the CPAC idea is that the police exist
to serve the community not oppose it.
Real community control of police and the criminal justice
system is basic to any democracy. Along with the generalized declining
perception by Americans about the legitimacy of political institutions,
minorities and youth see the police more as an occupying army than a force for
protecting the safety, security, and independence of members of their
community.
MONDAY,
OCTOBER 29, 2018
DEEP
STRUCTURES, HATE, AND VIOLENCE: The Long Road to Societal Decay
The reality that undergirds the killing of masses of people on a regular basis is not easily discovered. That is, there are “deep structures” that have created a brutal and violent world. And movements to transform these deep structures, although complicated, can have some substantial success.
First, and I write this at the risk of being dismissed as an ideologue, the contemporary state of the capitalist economic system must be examined in rigorous detail. What might be called “late capitalism” is an economic system of growing inequality of wealth and poverty, joblessness, declining access to basic needs-food, health care, housing, education, transportation. The increasing accumulation of wealth determines the ever-expanding appropriation of political power. In the era of late capitalism, economic concentration resides in a handful of banks, hedge funds, medical conglomerates, real estate developers, technology and insurance companies, and media monopolies.
Second, late capitalism continues to marginalize workers of all kinds. Agricultural and manufacturing work, the staple of two hundred years of economic development, is disappearing. Highly skilled electronic workers and others with twenty-first century skills are employed as needed by corporations, with little or no job security. Once secure workers who have lost their jobs live in communities with declining access to food, growing environmental devastation, and limited connection to information and the ability to communicate with others. And, of course, conditions are worse for workers of color, women, the young, and the old. A new working class has emerged, the “precariat,” with skilled but insecure jobs; the service sector, workers in health care, home care, fast food and other low paid and overworked occupations; and workers in the “informal sector,” desperate people who take short-term jobs or are forced to sell drugs, peddle products on the street, engage in prostitution, or engage in other activities so they and their families can survive. In addition, the most marginalized are homeless and hungry. Late capitalism has increased the marginalization of majorities of working people, in core capitalist states and the Global South.
Third, the history of capitalist development has paralleled the development of white supremacy and patriarchy. If capital accumulation requires the expropriation of the wealth produced by workers, what better way to increase profits can be found than marginalizing sectors of the working population and setting them into competition and conflict with each other by creating categories of difference. Racism, sexism, homophobia, the demonization of immigrants, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim hysteria all serve, in the end, profit and the accumulation of wealth and power.
Fourth,
systems of concentrated wealth and power require the development of political
institutions, institutions that enhance the control of the behavior of workers.
From monarchies, to constitutional democracies, to institutionalized systems of
law and custom, such as segregation, voter suppression in our own day, the
behavior of the citizenry is routinized and controlled. In most political
systems electoral processes create some possibilities for modest, but
necessary, policy changes. However, as Nancy MacLean points out in Democracy
in Chains, economic and political elites use their resources to restrict
and limit the influence of democratic majorities.
Given these deep structures is it any surprise that brutal violence flairs up against sectors of the population? Is it any surprise that targeted groups feel intimidated, threatened, and angry? Is it any surprise that volatile and life-threatening cycles of economic insecurity facing most people create fears leading some of them to follow false prophets? Is it any surprise that the economic and political institutions in which we were born and raised, justified by powerful ideologies about the “realities” of life develop in us a propensity to be taken in by arrogant, racist, classist, sexist, and ignorant politicians? In addition to national politics, people at the state level and in their local communities accept unquestioning leadership in economic, political, and cultural institutions that in subtler ways promote the agenda of the rich and white.